The Limits to Growth (1972)

We have many examples of us both adapting and failing to adapt, and can therefore say things like "adapts X% of the time", except in those cases the solution has often been "move elsewhere and/or fight other people" which I think isn't useful because it doesn't work so well on a planetary scale unless and until interplanetary travel is as easy as the Mayflower/Plymouth Rock journey.

Might still be useful for general governance just by characterising dangerous parts of the phase space[0] where dragons be so they can be avoided.

[0] how does phase space differ from latent space anyway?

The paper lines this out in detail, e.g. for the GDP of Denmark.

I'd suggest you read it instead of going in attack mode. And honestly, I find this kind of statement very tiresome, too:

> Your article is a variant on the tiresome "X won't save us" articles that point out, rather boringly, that one single thing isn't enough to lead us into some eco-nirvana.

Information value zero. It seems you refuse to even try and understand the science and the problems.

If you read the article, you'd know that "Green growth is not feasible as the sole strategy to reduce emissions" is basically sugar coating for "Green growth is a lie".

It is sugar coated in an attempt to reach people in power who, just like you, refuse to think about basic facts and instead retreat to partisanship.

And sorry, but another thing I have to add: this is not "my" article, and it does not need "bonus points" by people who obviously haven't read or understood it (based on the absent content in your response and the time you took to write it)

Everyone is taken in by technological razzle-dazzle. Especially the generals and politicians.

That's how a certain country ended up spending an extra £100k per round to add high precision GPS targeting and guidance to wide dispersal flechette munitions. Now we can attack a square kilometre, with an accuracy of 50cm. Perfect for when you need to take out an enemy column right next to a school sports day, right?

Most of us are taken in by the merest technological puff and bluster, with words like "precision", "accuracy", "power", "security" having no common meaning whatsoever. It's why we're in such a mess with privacy, cybersecurity and the like, because those in charge are good at comparing numbers but haven't the least idea what they're talking about at the most fundamental conceptual level.

Disease is much much worse than war, even in the bad old days (WW1 17 million vs Spanish Flu 25-50 million), and today the comparison is with covid: even if Gaza was literally nuked with 100% fatalities, that's 2.4 million people, whereas Covid deaths, according to wikipedia, are:

> 6,988,666 (reported), 18.2–33.5 million (estimated)

Whoever legally owns them.

>Is it a god-given freedom to pollute the environment and damage other people's lives?

No, those people should be taken to court or private arbitration for violating whoevers property or rights were violated. If I have land I dont want it poisoned because there is an opportunity cost; people dont poison their own land, they poison others if they can get away with it, which is why most environmental catastrophes (flint, derailed chemical trains, pipeline bombings, nuclear war) occur as a result of government action, they have immense protection from legal accountability.

>This doesn't sound as if you believe in a non-dystopian free market.

What makes you say that? The free market exists anywhere there isnt something to stop it. If someone needs a cheap couch, I can at once see that 2 things are possible simultaneously, that the cheap couch is their best available option and should be available, and that their buying decisions might have been different if they had a better vehicle for saving their wealth. The non-dystopian future is the one where the cheap couch is available, but people also have a reasonable ability to save for something nicer that might last longer. Where the free market isnt, is in sanctions, central banking, bailouts, taxation, and government regulation, hopefully that clarifies things.

>In a way, yes! What use is a car without car infrastructure?...

There were cars and roads before there were taxes and subsidies to support them, if there is a market demand for cars and infastructure then it will be built. Simple equation, will I pay for a car and roads, call it an investment, so that I can get to work, and make even more money? Yes, that would be a good way to spend the money I have. See, you can hold a vote and remove those from public spending, but I still have an incentive to pay for these items, in fact id prefer it that way.

>Who decides if you are allowed to make goods and services by exploiting natural resources and polluting the environment?

Yes, great question, in fact the same one I framed to you. Are you going to vote to stop me from using my own legally and freely traded property to produce something? What if we vote to take your stuff, not everybodies, just yours. What if we vote that you are inconvenient to the rest of us? I imagine that will not end well for minority populations, is there anything we cant do if we vote for it?

>Honestly, "market failure" and "externalities" are well-known concepts to economists.

Could you unpack the term marlet failure? I dont think you quite understand what that term means; setting a price floor for lizard tails with the intention of exterminating them from your city would (has) lead to a market failure, there would (are) be more lizards than ever as breeders harvest their tales, and government wearhouses would (did) overflow with useless lizard tails.

Rational self interest is an economic term, and yes they do, even if psychic profit is the only one they aquire, they still value that over whatever they traded away, otherwise they wouldnt have willingly traded.

>There is no natural order of the market.

So, if we dont coax the market along it will just be chaos? What do you mean? Companies develop a product people are willing to pay for, so they purchase resources and hire employees to create and sell it. Thats order, sometimes another company comes along and outcompetes them, thats still order.

>There are already rules in every society restricting freedom of individual, even in places we consider free

I am well aware, I wouldnt consider them free.

>Most people savings aren't tied to the stock market.

Most people dont have savings at all, most people cant save for a $500 emergency. Whats your point?

I dont think its anyones main function to be in the way, I think there is a lot of money to be made if you can restrict economic alternatives and funnel that business to yourself.

To which you responded that japan is empirical evidence against that. To which I replied it is a good example to the contrary. Now you are saying 2 things 1. thats not the model 2. I have only explained why growth is useful, not why its necessary.

To 1, I agree, I totally reject this model, this is a curve fitting excercise, not real science and not real economics.

To 2, in a sense you are correct. There is something waiting under the surface to strike any country of today should they decide degrowth is the policy, should they not decide to print it off for another day.

See, all the dollars in the economy, the dollars in your wallet, and in your bank account, were created through the issuance of debt, such as home loans and government debt. Those debts have interest rates, meaning for every dollar in existence there is a multiple owed to the great abyss of currency being taken out of circulation when those debts are paid. If our monetary system doesnt continually increase the amount of debt in the system, eventually all the dollars would seemingly vanish from the system and we would still have debt that there were never enough dollars to pay for. There is the death of all your modern monies should degrowth be the objective, democracy or otherwise.

Now, the monetary system doesnt need to be that way, money could be a commodity that doesnt come with these strings attached. You might even find that the worlds largest polluters cease their operations immediately if that were ever to come true, I dont think the Pentagon would have the same incentive to invade oil rich middle eastern countries if they didnt have their precious petrodollar to defend.

Could a democracy work, with degrowth, and without the pitfalls caused by implimenting the credit theory of money? Sure, just start killing everyone, because for the first time in generations people would have a money that routes around attempts to inhibit growth, what else can you do at that point?

Long story short your ability to observe qualia suggests to you that you have a faculty which is infinite.

Of course, in the context of this thread, the fact that only a finite subset of the universe is accessible to us is very relevant.

The off-topic attacks are: Deforestation, climate change, habitat loss, extinctions, toxification of the ocean, pollution, microplastics, etc.

I should have call these "red herrings." All the off-topic nonsense distracts from the obvious fact that as population density rises, per-capita GDP also rises. This has been true for 99% of all human history. Denying this by claiming that overpopulation is a problem is absurd. If a hypothesis is contradicted by almost all of recorded history, then only a crazy person believes that.

> I was replying to your off-topic comment and attack on the credibility and myth of the posted book.

I meant to say the book makes claims that are contradicted by all of human history (like food production not being able to scale to match the population, and a higher population leading to lower per-capita GDP.) That is an attack on an argument, not an ad hominem attack on a person.

> If that author claims that there are no limits to growth, then why, exactly, do we need to terraform and mine an entire other planet?

I would say there are no hard limits to growth; there are no limits we can not overcome. Part of how we achieve may be to terraform and mine many other planets.

> Do you not see the conflict there?

I do not see a conflict between saying we can grow and this is one way we can grow.

This discussion reminds me of my once telling a student "You can achieve anything you want to achieve" and their replying "But that takes hard work, so how and I supposed to achieve it?"

>> that food production and wealth can not scale with the population is absurd. > History shows us that that is not the case.

Please show me a few times in history when an increasing population led to a decrease in per-capita GDP, or when a decreasing population led to an increase in per-capita GDP.

I mean times we have records of, not things made up by people digging in the ground. We have written records going back thousands of years. They show that increasing population and increasing population density lead to increasing per-capita GDP and a decreasing percentage of each person's wealth being spent on food.

> It can scale, but at the expense of tons of other things, and history indeed shows us that that's the case.

Are you saying we can grow at the expense of other things? I believe everything comes at some price. That's called trade-offs.

Please show me examples of whatever it is you are referring to.

> The so-called Third Agricultural Revolution has shown us that quite explicitly.

You are referring to the "Green Revolution." I'm no expert on that. I have relatives in the dairy farming industry who laugh at the dumb city people who pay them to do things in a "green" way. They take the money and mock the environmentalists. I'm not an expert in this field, but it reminds me of Reason TV's "Great Moments in Unintended Consequences" https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBuns9Evn1w9XhnH7vVh_...

> And prove what wrong? I don't know what you're claiming or its relevance.

Please prove the following wrong:

The more dense the population, the higher the per-capita GDP.

The more man-lives we have records of, the more technology we have access to. Inventions are directly correlated to man-lives (or man-years) we have records of.

Mathus' and the Club of Rome's claim that food production and wealth can not scale with the population is absurd. History shows us that that is not the case. As our population increased over thousands of years of recorded history, we did not become poorer or unable to feed ourselves. Instead, as our population went up, our per-capita GDP increased and the percentage of our income we spent to feed ourselves decreased.

Please, prove me wrong. Read the first chapter of Merchants of Despair and prove Dr. Zubrin wrong.

> If you're talking about per-capita GDP, I regret to inform you that wealth inequality and disparity is at an all-time high. So increasing the GDP has in fact correlated with a decrease in standard in living for the vast majority of people, relatively speaking.

Another red herring. I never discussed the distribution of wealth. I said:

The more dense the population, the higher the per-capita GDP.

The more man-lives we have records of, the more technology we have access to. Inventions are directly correlated to man-lives (or man-years) we have records of.

Mathus' and the Club of Rome's claim that food production and wealth can not scale with the population is absurd. History shows us that that is not the case. As our population increased over thousands of years of recorded history, we did not become poorer or unable to feed ourselves. Instead, as our population went up, our per-capita GDP increased and the percentage of our income we spent to feed ourselves decreased.

Please, prove me wrong. Read the first chapter of Merchants of Despair and prove Dr. Zubrin wrong.

> If we take a look at raw numbers, there are more people starving today than there were people alive approximately 200 hundred years ago. Maybe the percentage of total population has changed, in either direction, but the point is that that is an absolute increase in the amount of suffering not offset by the number of people not suffering.

This argument makes no sense to me.

We can easily feed the world's people given the amount of food we produce. We can easily increase the amount of food we produce if we wish to spend the money.

As our population has grown, the percentage of hungry people has fallen: https://ourworldindata.org/famine-mortality-over-the-long-ru...

> So like I said, you can bounce around these facts, and they are facts, all you want with a technocratic lens, but the data is quite clear that growth has led to a myriad of issues.

Let me repeat:

The more dense the population, the higher the per-capita GDP.

The more man-lives we have records of, the more technology we have access to. Inventions are directly correlated to man-lives (or man-years) we have records of.

Mathus' and the Club of Rome's claim that food production and wealth can not scale with the population is absurd. History shows us that that is not the case. As our population increased over thousands of years of recorded history, we did not become poorer or unable to feed ourselves. Instead, as our population went up, our per-capita GDP increased and the percentage of our income we spent to feed ourselves decreased.

Please, prove me wrong. Read the first chapter of Merchants of Despair and prove Dr. Zubrin wrong.

This is all I am arguing. You can throw up silly things about income inequality and some obscure type of pollution that I have never noticed, but anyone who denies the facts I listed above denies reality.

> Ignoring these issues and trends shows a huge misunderstanding of dynamic and complex systems.

The trends are that increasing population makes each person more wealthy.

> If there are issues with the methods in The Limits of Growth, that's fine, but at least they attempted to model these things.

Their models claimed we would all be starving by the year 2000. Their models failed. Their models were cited as the reason to deny over a billion people access to a modern lifestyle. That's called "genocide."

> Pointing fingers at people trying to understand the direction we are heading is not productive.

I agree. Chart population density vs. per-capital GDP and stop pointing fingers.

> I invite you to look at even simple things, like carpet. Approximately 95% of all carpet made heads to the landfill. Think about that for a second.

This is another red herring.

I don't think you understand what those numbers mean. It is not true that 95% of carpet is manufactured, and then heads to a landfill without ever being used.

Carpet must be a rugged thing to be used like it is, so it is hard to tear apart to recycle. The threads in carpet are small and very durable, so they are hard to recycle. This is why most carpet is laid down, used for decades, then eventually sent to a landfill.

> We literally use up materials, people, effort, time, money, etc. just to dump it all in a landfill. And that's "just" carpet. It's the very definition of pointless.

No, we do not. We use materials, people, effort, time, money, etc. to have nice floors that keep our feet warm so we do not spend as much heating our homes or suffering on cold tile. That's a reasonable thing to do in an industrial society.

I'm happy to elaborate some more, but first, please, graph the written-down, recorded population in any area over a few centuries and then plot it against their per-capita GDP in that area.

If the economic or social constraints are such that individuals are unwilling to bear children then that is it, you do not get to try again.

Today we straddle those in the fertile window with student debt, high rent or an impossible housing market, thus less chose to have children.

This is not to say that it's a cataclysm, but it's certainly unsustainable from a societal standpoint.

Look at Japan[1] -- roughly two thirds of their population is over than child bearing age, so even if the remaining third starting having babies at the replacement rate, their population will continue to diminish for decades. But of course their fertility rate in nowhere near replacement[2] and even the UN doesn't expect it to be that high in the foreseeable future.

[1] https://www.populationpyramid.net/japan/2023/ [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/JPN/japan/fertility-ra...